Hey guys. Okay, by now it should be very obvious that I did not complete (or even really begin) the 30 Characters Challenge. A busy month, what can I say.

Here’s the postcard I designed for Christmas this year. The Hebrew text at the top reads “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and the large Latin text at the bottom says “and the Word became flesh.” (John 1:14)

I knew that given my recent re-involvement with Jesus Christ I couldn’t get away with a snowy, jingly “secular” Christmas image this year. I also knew that I didn’t want to fall into the sort of sentimental trap of many religious Christmas cards, where the manger scene is played for cuteness or pathos or the Maji for Oriental mystery. Babies are cute, sure. A baby born in an ancient barn is an interesting story, I guess… but the point of the incarnation is that this particular baby was the same person who SPOKE THE UNIVERSE INTO EXISTENCE.

WHAT!?!?

Merry Christmas, y’all! I’ll probably have some more drawings up before the 25th.

By the way, if the image looks a little weird it’s because it was optimized for print using a tutorial by the digital print sorceress Christianne Goudreau.

I drew this picture for my old friend Elliot Kaplan, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. If anyone I know can answer the timeless question “Magnets, how do they work?” it’s probably Elliot. He currently works with the Madison Dynamo Experiment. My understanding of this is limited by my own feeble brain and not by Elliot’s lucid explanatory skills, but here’s the gist: The earth has a magnetic field. The earth’s mantle is full of circulating molten metal, and its circulation is what generates this field. In Madison they’ve built a large, hollow globe, which they fill with liquid sodium (a convenient approximation of the earth’s mantle, which I think is mostly silicon and magnesium).

They blend the sodium around with fans and pass magnetic fields through it, measuring the results. And here’s where I get a little shaky. Lightning crashes and all the scientists start laughing maniacally, God get furious, Galactus shows up hungry, and before you know it the Dynamo kills your wife on your wedding night.

Okay, so what’s this have to do with my drawing? Apparently, it’s a tradition for Elliot and his crew to get Chinese food before every run of the experiment. In some cryptic way, the fortune cookie fortunes have so far always predicted the outcome of the day’s run. Elliot commissioned a cartoon depicting physicists divining the future from fortune cookies, suggesting that their safety gear would make for good “cultish regalia.” I couldn’t agree more!

Today is Independoween, the holiday that is calendrically equidistant from Halloween and the 4th of July. The holiday was the brainchild of my friend Xavier Lyles, who envisions Independoween celebrations as containing the best of these two holidays: fireworks AND costumes; backyard barbecues AND candy; jingoistic patriotism AND a spooky sense of the macabre. You could carve an American flag into a pumpkin. Or you could dress up like Independoween’s unofficial mascot, Benjamin Franklinstein:

It would have been really cool if Xavier and I were the originators of Ben Franklinstein, but unfortunately that isn’t true. I discovered that people have been mashing these two together for quite some time. There’s even a YA book about the character. Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. It is with great sadness that I’ve decided not to suggest this idea to Dylan Meconis as a potential follow-up to her werewolf/Enlightenment and vampire/French Revolution franchise.

However, my unoriginality is not simply a coincidence. A quote from Frankensteinia, an all-Frankenstein-all-the-time blog:

The connection between the Franklin and Frankenstein has been explored extensively. The real-life Franklin and the fictional Victor Frankenstein were contemporaries, and both were electrical experimenters. Frankenstein observed a tree shattered by lightning, and Franklin apocryphally flew a kite and a key in a thunderstorm, inspiring movie Frankensteins to release kites, capture lightning and zap monsters to life.

Mary Shelley was familiar with Franklin and his experiments. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was tutored in politics by Dr. Richard Price who supported the American Revolution and corresponded with Franklin. One of her publishers, Joseph Johnson, had released Franklin’s works in London, and her lover, Gilbert Imlay, was American and a Revolutionary fighter. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, was influenced by Franklin’s politics and he was a member, as was Franklin, of the scientific Royal Society of London. Mary Shelley’s companion, Percy Bysshe Shelley, studied Franklin and was conversant with electrical experimentation.

There is frequently quoted speculation that Mary’s choice of name for her scientist was inspired by, and perhaps even an homage to Franklin, though “Frankenstein” was not a rare name and Mary had almost certainly encountered it in 1814 during her trip down the Rhine and a stopover in the vicinity of Burg Frankenstein. Nevertheless, it is said that Franklin’s electrical experiments were so widely known and notorious that the novel’s original readers, back in 1818, would have easily made the Franklin/Frankenstein connection. Many scholars have since explored the influence of Benjamin Franklin on Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy and Mary Shelley, and its reflection in Mary famous novel, making Founding Father Benjamin Franklin one of numerous men of science of the era who are thought of as the “real” Frankenstein.

Just as we involuntarily, subconsciously know that purple + green= Hulk, red + gold = Iron Man and gray + bluish black + a tiny bit of yellow = Batman, we can’t see that unique combination of blue-green, red, flesh and lavender without immediately thinking (in a Jamaican accent) “Ariel!” We can instantly recognizable all the Disney heroines from their color schemes alone. I haven’t tried it with any other characters, but you can easily imagine similar color swatches for villains (Ursula, Gaston, Jafar, Scar, and Radcliffe all have wonderful and very distinct color schemes), heroes (think of Beast, Aladdin, John Smith, or especially Quasimodo), or even supporting characters (though characters like Flounder, Genie, Phoebus, or Mushu tend to be colored from much simpler palettes.) In every case, the colors are as unique as the character designs themselves.

(Notice that with the exception of Snow White these are all characters from the post-1989 Disney Renaissance. Disney had some terrific character designs in the 30’s, 50’s and 60’s, but the color element doesn’t particularly stand out for me. Quick! What color was Aurora’s dress in Sleeping Beauty? …See? Even if you know, you had to think about it.)

I don’t understand color. I barely understand how it works in real life, and I’m certainly not to the point of being able design with color in an appealing way. What Disney does (or did?) is simply amazing to me. They can paint with all the colors of the wind!

Ali Farzat is a great Syrian political cartoonist. Recently he was kidnapped by paramilitary thugs (believed to be working for Pres. Bashar Assad) and brutally beaten. They deliberately broke both of his hands.

(click for larger version)

I was going to write a long tract about the metaphorical dimension of this horrible attack, but it’s all pretty obvious, really. Farzat spoke Truth to Power and met a fate similar to so many who do. I’ll just add that Farzat’s cartoons are awesome, and he’s obviously a man after my own heart, my very favorite type of political cartoonist. Google him some time. It’s purely visual storytelling – no patronizing labels or captions, none of the gags based solely on dialogue or wordplay which have made our own editorial pages so trite and boring. What’s even better, Farzat seldom caricatures specific individuals. He rarely, for instance, draws the tyrant Assad. Rather, he seems to draw “types,” the archetypal plutocrat, politician, pauper, or proletarian. This is such a great way to de-emphasize transitory “personality politics” and keep the focus where it should be, on the long-term conflict of classes.

By the way, on the off-chance that somebody wants to read my cartoon right-to-left, here’s the Arabic version:

Get well soon, Ali. Get well soon, Syria. Ash-sha`b yurid isqat an-nizam!

My friend and housemate Katy Ellis O’Brien is having a coloring contest to promote the upcoming release of her coloring book. I encourage all of you to enter it. Digitally coloring Katy’s images is particularly fun, since all of her linework is closed, animation-style, meaning you can select areas using Photoshop’s magic wand tool instead of the tedious lasso.

Katy originally drew most of these drawings for her after-school-care kids at the YMCA. Often the kids themselves will request the subject matter, resulting in some really quirky images like a dog riding a motorscooter.

Since I’m pretty certain that, as her housemate, I’m ineligible for the contest, I decided to color this image deliberately in a way that would annoy Katy. She has often expressed her distaste for the current trend in computer animation to apply photo-realistic textures to cartoony, malproportioned characters. I guess she thinks that cartoony characters should be rendered in a smoother, more graphical way. I definitely see her point. When this is done badly, it’s one of the worst looking things you could imagine.

But there are also times when I think it works, and I don’t know exactly what to peg this on. There’s something about that Joe-Sacco-type big-picture-little-picture imbalance that I kinda like, where each little piece of stubble is delicately rendered on a figure who is basically a few squares and circles.

Today I painted a sign for my friend Rand’s new farm, One Leaf Farm up in Carnation, WA. I can’t take credit for the design though – somebody else created that logo. I think it’s pretty good. Logos for “organic” products are usually characterized by earthen tones and tedious images of red barns nestled in quiet valleys. (Yes, nestled. Always nestled.) This black and white logo will stand out from the colors of the surrounding booths and from the vegetables themselves.

I visited New York City last weekend and was kept so busy with friends that I barely got to draw at all. But on my last day there I did manage to sketch a bunch of people having lunch in Union Square. I like the quizzical woman in the center – she really did look like that.

And this dog with a tennis ball, and this other guy.

Drawing from life is really fun, and I wish I’d gotten to do more of it while I was in New York. The city is full of such interesting-looking people, even if most of them won’t stand still. These picture all had to be scribbled in under a minute.

Here’s a birthday card I made for my friend Tamar, who is a big fan of Edna Mode from The Incredibles. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I don’t consider myself to be very adept at drawing characters designed by other people, unlike some of my artist friends who are very good at it. But I think I did a little better here, after scrutinizing some screencaps from the movie and rewatching Edna’s scenes on YouTube.

Of course, Edna Mode is (c) Disney, Pixar etc. But maybe I could make some money marketing this as a birthday card!

(Before I decided to make this a comic-book cover, I wanted it to be a movie poster.)

“Larry, baby! Got a new idea for St. Patty’s Day. Yeah, I know, who can care any more? He’s an old dead saint, grey beard, lotta robes. The kids ain’t exactly beating down the doors for this fella’s autograph, am I right? So here’s how I see it: we go darker and edgier. Think “300” meets “Anaconda,” in 5th century Ireland! Ol’ Pat himself is three parts Kratos from “God of War” and one part Boondock Saint… a total badass! He’s gotta rescue the pagan princess from the coils of a cobra voiced by Sean Connery – she’s Keira Knightley from “King Arthur,” but with a D-cup. A comical CGI leprechaun? Sure, I guess that’d work. Howabout I give Marlon Wayans a call? Think it over – we’ll do lunch!”

By the way, the black-and-white original for this picture, though flawed (what’s with his right arm? You call that foreshortening?) is still probably one of the best things I’ve ever drawn. Because of this, and because I am broke as a 5th-century pagan, I am selling it on my etsy page for $25. Consider snatching it up! Proceeds will go toward the health insurance I have to buy because I don’t live in Ireland.

This is a silly gag that’s been floating around in my head for about a month now. Even though it’s a fairly small cartoon (5″x9″), its composition took me a fairly long time, because there’s so much going on and it has to be chaotic but intelligible. I spent a lot of time trying to get rid of tangencies, spots where the edges of subjects touch but don’t overlap, which confuse depth perception. Of course, tangencies happen all the time in real life, but our brains usually don’t have as much trouble with them then. I wasn’t entirely successful eliminating all the tangencies in this drawing – I really don’t like how the delivery man’s left arm lines up with the passenger-side door, for instance – but I like to think I’m getting better all the time.

I am in constant awe of artists who can create female characters who are simultaneously sexy and funny. As many horribly unentertaining Cameron Diaz pratfalls attest, such a synthesis is much more easily proposed than executed. One of my life goals is to be able to draw a beautiful woman making a funny face. The flecks of bloody gray matter currently clinging to my dining room ceiling are attributable to the mind-blowing art of Jaime Hernandez, whom I am only just now really “discovering.” In addition to doing just about everything else in comics perfectly, J.H. can draw a woman crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out, while still making her obviously beautiful.